The Godfather Returns by Mark Winegardner Read Free Book Online Page A

120-degree heat for tunnel-riddled coral islands ladled with a maggoty stew of mud and corpses.
“For some reason flying relaxes me,” he said. “I’ve been taking lessons.”
    Kay exhaled. She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath. She hadn’t realized that, in all those unaccounted-for hours the past few weeks, she was afraid he was having an affair.
That’s not true.
What she was afraid of was worse. “It’s good you have a hobby,” she ventured. “Everyone needs a hobby. Your father had his garden. Other men have golf.”
    “Golf,” he said. “Hmm. You don’t have a hobby, do you?”
    “I don’t,” she said.
    “There’s always golf.” He was wearing a tailored sport coat and a stark white shirt with no necktie. He hadn’t slicked his hair. A light wind tousled it.
    “Actually,” she said, “what would you think if I went back to teaching?”
    “That’s a job,” Michael said. “You don’t need a job. Who’d watch Mary and Anthony?”
    “I wouldn’t start until we’re settled. By then your mother will be here and she could do it. Carmela would be
thrilled
to do it.” Though Kay actually dreaded hearing what her mother-in-law would say about Kay working outside the home. “Really, all it would be is a hobby.”
    “Do you want a job?” Michael said.
    She looked away. A job wasn’t exactly the point.
    “Let me think about it.” His father wouldn’t have approved, but he was not his father. Michael had once, like his father, been married to a nice Italian girl, but Kay did not know that and was not that girl. What concerned Michael was security, even though it was part of the code that the risks to her were slight. Michael put a hand on her arm and gave it a gentle squeeze.
    Kay put her hand on top of his. She took a deep breath. “Well, look,” she said. “I’m not getting in that contraption. At least not until you tell me where we’re going.”
    Michael shrugged. “Tahoe,” he said. A grin flickered on his face. “
Lake
Tahoe.” He gestured to the seaplane. “Obviously.”
    She’d told him once she’d love to go there. She hadn’t thought he’d been listening.
    He opened the door to the plane. Kay got in. As she did, her dress both hiked up and stretched taut across her ass. Michael felt a wild impulse to grab her hips from behind but instead just let his eyes linger. There was nothing better, nothing sexier, than looking at your wife like this without her knowing it.
    “Now, the only tricky part about floatplanes,” Michael said as he got in and started the engine, “is that they sometimes flip.”
    “Flip?!” Kay said.
    “Rarely.” He stuck out his lower lip, as if to indicate the lightning-strike unlikelihood of such a thing. “And if a floatplane flips, guess what? It floats.”
    Kay regarded him. “That’s comforting.”
    “I do love you,” he said. “You know that, right?”
    She tried for the expressionlessness Michael had mastered all too well. “That’s also comforting.”
    Their takeoff was so smooth that Kay felt her every muscle relax. She hadn’t been aware that they were clenched. She had no idea for how long.

Chapter 4
    O VER L AKE E RIE, the small plane flew into the teeth of a thunderstorm. The cabin was hot, which suited Nick Geraci just fine. The other men in the plane were sweating just as much as he was. The bodyguards had already blamed it on the heat. Tough guys. He’d been one of them, once, written off as a big dumb ox, both relied upon and disposable.
    “I thought the storm was behind us,” said Frank Falcone, one of the silk-shirted men, the one in orange, the one who didn’t know who the pilot really was.
    “You said a mouthful,” said the one in aquamarine, Tony Molinari, who did know.
    The hits on the top men in the Barzini, Tattaglia, and Corleone crime syndicates had aroused the interest of law enforcement everywhere, from local-yokel hard-ons to the FBI (though the agency’s director, supposedly because the